


the velvet clematis that clung around your windowsill, are waiting for you still

by anotherstrangersweet



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: ...ok so there is a tiny tiny bit of angst, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, M/M, Nothing Hurts, but the overriding theme is sunshine and smiles and true love!, no one talks like this, oh well, oliver is very in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-17 10:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15459573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherstrangersweet/pseuds/anotherstrangersweet
Summary: “What if I spoke to Papà? What if we came up with a plan?”“Then by all means,” I replied, “I would wait for you. I feel as though I shall wait for you regardless—even if you change your mind and decide to forget about this summer.”





	1. youth

**Author's Note:**

> hi there! here comes the trainwereck that is my writing...
> 
> this is entirely from oliver’s pov and will likely be only two chapters long. there’s not much of a plot because these are very short and i wanted merely to explore two random days within the course of oliver and elio’s relationship. 
> 
> title credit to roland leighton’s ‘hédauville’
> 
> enjoy!

_early august, 1983_

 

 

 

 

 

If all the world were brought together in one place to display beauty and affection, it were here. Somehow, one forgot that outside the confines of this perpetual summer, a clime existed that was dull and harsh and accusatory. One forgot that this wasn’t eternal; that the finite days would eventually, close up like flowers in reverse; amounting to only a myriad of fierce memories and emotions. Certainly, I forgot, as I caressed the long pale neck of my lover and kissed his lips, whispering into the laziness of the day:

 

 

 

 

 

“You’re like a little butterfly; delicate and soft. Ah, _mia piccola farfalla,_ don’t look so perturbed, I’m not patronising you.”

 

Elio took my hand and bit down upon my finger. Not hard; he would never hurt me as I would never hurt him, it was just a little pressure and I laughed, taking the bitten finger and resting it upon his wet lips. 

 

“What are you doing, huh?”

 

“Being perturbed” he replied smartly, eyes searching for the adoration he craved, which lingered, as if an afterthought, perhaps, in the iris’ of my eyes.

 

I moved to lie beside him, underneath the peach tree at the very back of his mothers orchard, half in the shade, half out of it, and Elio climbed atop my hips, one hand fisting my shirt where it was unbuttoned at my chest. 

 

“Hello, you!” I laughed, enjoying the feeling of his weight upon me as if he were a childhood comforter and I held his tiny pale thighs in my hands, just to get that extra bit of contact. 

 

“I’ve a proposition,” he said, tugging on my buttons.

 

“A proposition? Oh what nature?”

 

“Hear me out and you’ll know, won’t you.”

 

Chuckling, I pinched his ribs and said:

 

“Yes, alright! What’s this proposition?”

 

Elio shifted, seemingly apprehensive, his pretty face canopied by a frown.

 

“Wait for me.” was all he said; earnest and steady but still so very unsure. 

 

I knew he thought I’d laugh at him—he was always so terrified of my disapproval and mockery—and I shifted him upon my hips so that I could sit up, holding his body on my lap. He would not look at me; shy and self-conscious now that we were eye to eye. 

 

“Do you have a plan?” I questioned, unable to say anything to dampen his already shivering soul. 

 

“Come back for Winter and Spring and I’ll apply to universities in New York.” 

 

He was so concise, so blunt, so simple in his speech; there was no fumble, no room for improvement. 

 

“You said you wanted to attend the _Conservatoire de Paris_  come September, Elio,”

 

“Why not Julliard, instead?”

 

“Because Samuel said you’ve always dreamed of studying in Paris—it’s not right to take something so very dear away from you; you’ll only ever resent me for it.” 

 

He huffed, angered at the mention of his father, no doubt. He hated to be babied, but he must’ve recognised the truth in my words; surely desire had not obscured all reason from his thoughts.

 

“What does Papà know—“

 

“He knows what you’ve been saying for years; what you’ve dreamt of for years. That is enough.”

 

But it was not enough. This summer, however enchanting, however beautiful—full of grace—did not leave us even half as much of the time we hoped to own. I wanted desperately to wait for him; the thought of our sharing an apartment, anywhere, it mattered not, flattened my desperate hope for pragmatism and heterosexuality. If these were the last minuets of my life, I would die so intensely pleasured by just the look of him alone. I needed nothing more from the world, I had tasted Heaven upon my tongue where it had known the inside of his mouth and his lissome skin. 

 

“Don’t coddle me, just say it, Oliver. You’ve no desire to wait for me.”

 

I was hurt by his self-doubt. How could he even begin to assume that I didn’t want to wait for him? Never had I wished to have something so entirely. To capsulate his mind; his body; his heart within the confines of myself?—I was worn to the bone thinking of leading a life that was not his; for him: cold and barren was the landscape that stretched out after August reached its culmination. 

 

“That is the only thing I desire, apart from never leaving your side,” I contradicted, secretly ashamed to be so dangerously in love and yet too afraid to take the necessary risks for it. 

 

Elio seemed disbelieving of my declaration but he also smiled, tiny and grand, kissing the corner of my mouth as if he were in reverence to it. 

 

“What if I spoke to Papà? What if we came up with a plan?”

 

“Then by all means,” I replied, “I would wait for you. I feel as though I shall wait for you regardless—even if you change your mind and decide to forget about this summer.”  

 

He regarded me, curious and pursed his pale lips. 

 

“You think I could forget this summer?” He said.

 

“I do.”

 

“You mustn’t, it isn’t true.” Then, “why do you hate yourself so much?” 

 

And just like that, I was arrested by his ability to know precisely what I was thinking, as I was thinking it. There was no pretence; no fumbling with probing questions that in the end would lead to the same conclusion. Whatever barriers that had been built over the natural course of time, came down softly and with no hassle. We were naked; bare, not for our lack of clothes but for our lack of falsehood. 

 

“Because I know myself,” I said, “and when I try to be good, well—“ 

 

“You don’t think this is good?” 

 

Elio stroked his thumb across the bone underneath my eye. And I couldn’t say no, for I did think this was good—it was everything—but if you looked at the course of my life, then it was bad. My friends and family, they would think this bad. My country too, she thought this bad. I wasn’t European: I could not make beauty and war and still be more lovely than destructive. I could not wait upon the liberal minds of my history; my history was not my own. Here, they had seen terror self-inflicted; were some of the worst of all mankind and yet, some of the loviest too. 

 

All I said was that this was good, yes, and Elio was smug as he shifted in my lap. 

 

“You are good, too.” He sighed, hugging me closer still, though we were already squashed together quite intimately. 

 

Then the day slipped by like the evening does when one is dancing with their friends, madly and without impediments, for the late hour is fun and all one has time for is the instantaneous moment and it’s carefree joy. 

 

We kissed; insatiable in our youth (youth! what a time, when all one wants is total understanding and the space in which to find their own—I couldn’t say we were careless, for we cared too much—but I understood that we were impatient to be held and to have our desires held, likewise.) until our lips smarted with the excess of time and as we came down from whatever place there was at the meeting of our skin, Elio read to me from _The Waves_ , and as Neville admired the young men rowing past him, I thought of how I had admired Elio as he had danced for me, a few nights past, in nothing but a pair of socks and my t-shirt.

 

Dinner that night was oddly quiet: just the four of us without one of the drudges Annella liked to softly roll her eyes at. I liked it. The Perlman’s conversation was endlessly pleasing and stimulating, rocking between the almost pedantic and effortlessly, infinitely knowledgable. Sometimes, I thought that between the three of them, they held everything anyone would ever need to know about experience and academia—this, of course, was silly, for no one knew everything, not even as a threesome, but it was an easy judgement to make that summer, when the way of Italy corrupted everything foul within the self, turning the skeptical and cynical, open and impressionable.

 

As Elio finished up dessert, though I cannot recall what it was that evening, I was struck with a heavy need and wanted desperately to take him, there, on the table; publicly, like some crazed mad man, and declined Samuel’s offer for another drink, claiming I was shattered and wished to turn in early that night. Elio, perhaps noticing the lust in my voice, said 

 

“Anche io sono stanco, posso andare?”

 

“Ovviamente, tesoro.” Annella replied, with a nonchalant wave of her hand, cigarette poised stylishly between her fore and middle finger.

 

“Sleep well, boys,” Samuel smiled, as we got up to go and Elio kissed both his parents cheeks; like a fool, I waited for him in the doorway. 

 

Upstairs, Elio was already slipping from his clothes before I closed the door to his room— _our room—_ and I could stand no longer the space between us, slipping into his blood-bubble and kneading his scalp with the intent to force forth from his lips, those breathy moans that came when I played with his hair. 

 

“What where you thinking about? At dinner?” He asked, hazy and uncoordinated as I sucked a bruise below his jaw. 

 

I told him about my fantasy—about having him in public, with no care for decency and decorum; no care for manners and shamefulness. 

 

“You’re disgusting,” he laughed, grinding onto my thigh and whining.

 

“Yeah?” 

 

“Yes. Why not by the window, instead? Will that satisfy your depraved thoughts? We can open it.” Elio undid my shorts and I nodded, kissing his temple, before we made love right up against the sill, probably not trying hard enough to be quiet. 

 

After we were done, I told him that he was disgusting too; he heartily agreed. Disgusting to me, and I hoped that the case for him was similar, meant only that he was the most wonderfully sensual person I had ever met and that nothing could change my mind when I said I would never know desire as wholly as I did when we slept together. 

 

As if he had read my mind, Elio scoffed and said into my neck, 

 

“Go to sleep and romance me in the morning, there’re some wildflowers by the Berm, I’ll find a vase.” 

 

“Oliver.” I said, waiting.

 

“Elio.” he replied, and then, together, for he almost always said it like this, with a little pause; 

 

“ _Elio, Elio, Elio_.”

 


	2. flowers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not sure when exactly vimini died, so I just made it up to fit with me story. oops? 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

_mid-july, 1986_

The rain that afternoon was terrible—like Achilles weeping, wrecked upon the floor, at the news of Patroclus’ death, embodied in weather—or, perhaps I was being dramatic. 

 

Elio, still just as soft at twenty, played with my fingers with the most comforting kind of reverence, but I was too preoccupied with the severity of Vimini’s sickness at that time to take much from the gesture. He had urged me to take my brooding from my rock to the house as the rain began to fall that afternoon; clucking like a parent chastising a child that I would catch my death if I didn’t come in at once. I had been merely in my bathing suit, after all. 

 

“Oliver, come out from under there.” He pleaded, always saddened to see me taken beneath the tide of my depressive tendency. 

 

“But she—“

 

“Is very sick, yes, but you aren’t a specialist doctor, Oliver. She knows, of course she does, that if you were, then you’d be beside her, right now— _jede Stunde—_ keeping her from pain.” 

 

“When did you learn German in France?” I asked, hoping to mask my despair with humour. 

 

“Oliver...” ah, there was that disapproving tone again; it would have turned me on if not for the circumstance.  

 

“Yeah I know, I need to get out of my head. What shall we do?” 

 

 Elio slipped from the sofa and walked towards the radio that had been playing at such a low volume, I had forgotten it was even in the room. He turned it up and some trashy Italian pop came on that I didn’t recognise; he had a look on his face that made me laugh: Elio was recalling my terrible dancing at _Le Danzig_  that summer, when I was stupid and tried too hard to make him jealous. 

 

Vimini wouldn’t be our first death. 

 

Elio and I, collectively, had known three people die over the last three years and now it would be four. We had such little time together, the topic of epidemics, hardly came up. He cried to me, down the phone, across the sea, when he heard of someone else’s passing, but once I had him in my arms, and he had me in his, we spoke mostly of trivial matters and school. Perhaps we were being selfish; perhaps we ought to have broken down upon the stairs every time we passed apartment 4, where my neighbour had been taken ill almost as suddenly as he had died. But we did not. Too aware that the seemingly numberless days, where, in fact, numbered more so than they had ever been before. Time, between the both of us, had always been borrowed but now it had been stolen, and we were secretly terrified that the lending agency would catch up with us and steal it back. 

 

“This song is terrible,” I said, as Elio swayed gently side to side. 

 

“It doesn’t matter, just dance with me.”

 

I gave him a look.

 

“Please,” he added, rolling his eyes but with such affection I couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to be offended. 

 

We danced the same way we always danced. Elio had, many times, told me how terribly he’d wished to be Chiara when we had put on that show at _Le Danzig,_ and now I always held him very close to me. Our hips rubbing against each other’s perhaps a little too possessively. It was different to how it had been then, when we were stupid enough to pretend that we were indifferent; I had never loved anything so violently, so tenderly, before and as we moved to the boring tune, I made sure he knew. 

 

Elio had gone to the C _onservatoire de Paris_ after a long discussion with his parents at the end of that Summer. I had come for Winter and Spring and by the time June of ‘84 had rolled around, I was sitting in another plane seat, clipping my seatbelt over my lap with a familiar _click!_

Elio hadn’t changed his mind. Paris was where he wanted to study. I said, calmly, because I wanted him to know it was ok, that I could cope, if this was to be the end. 

 

Elio had shook his head, like a little daffodil in April shakes its head in the breeze, and he told me he wanted to do this long distance. He’d chosen a course with a year abroad which he would spend in New York, and then we’d see each other on holidays. It was hard, but the alternative was worse so we made the best of it—I often said, when he called or in letters, that if it was ever too much, Elio was under no obligation to me. He had read it as ‘ _I don’t want to be with you, anymore_ ’ and had cried and cried and cried, until I realised what a mistake I had made in thinking that our affection weighed more heavily upon my side. When he had said he worshiped me, he had meant it. 

 

“Hey, you’re slipping again.” 

 

I looked down at the boy in my arms and pressed a kiss into his hair.

 

“Elio, it’s alright.”

 

He frowned and pulled away slightly, so that he could see me; “What do you—“

 

“It’s alright: that’s what I mean.”

 

-

 

Vimini wasn’t different when she spoke to me and I hated myself for expecting her to have let her mind turn as frail as her body. That was not Vimini; that was not who she was. 

 

“You don’t mind my coming, do you?” I asked, fidgety despite the fact she was a child and I am adult. It paid homage to her maturity and good person, that I might be so inclined. 

 

“Why would I mind?” She asked, incredulous. 

 

“I probably would have.” I shrugged.

 

“Only if I brought Elio with me. You were always so self-conscious around him.”

 

I smiled because it was true and there was nothing to be said that might make it not so. 

 

“Would you have?” I asked.

 

“Would I have brought Elio?”

 

I nodded.

 

“Probably not; I wouldn’t want you to be self-conscious if we weren’t to see each other again.”

 

How could she be so matter of fact and unemotional about this? I wanted to cry, like a silly little boy whose ice-cream slips from his cone; wasted—but she wasn’t crying and she wasn’t even past 14. 

 

I supposed that she was merely used to close calls and was now unfazed by them.

 

“I’m not self-conscious around him anymore.” I pointed out, just to appease her—or, in actuality, to appease myself.

 

“No. Well, I’d probably not have to bring him with me, anyway, because he’d already be there. Let’s not pretend Elio would have the self-control to come at the same time as everybody else. He’d want to be there first—I suppose you would want that, too.”

 

I laughed and teased; “Yeah, because then we’d be able to kiss without you making faces and whining about how gross we are, like you’re six!”

 

Vimini huffed, “Well, if could see yourself, you’d understand. It’s gross. You two are all handsy...”  

 

“We’re in love,” I pointed out, but with a little sigh and a dramatic clutch to the heart. At least she found it funny; I was done with false modesty about our affection for each other, which she liked, for she had said so many times, now in retrospect, that that summer had been intolerable when Elio would come up in conversation. 

 

“We didn’t talk about him that much.” I frowned.

 

“I don’t care. You’d go all soft and I’d have to fight hard for your attention—“

 

“But you love Elio. And you love me, what’s the problem?” I smirked, fully aware Vimini found me exasperating.

 

“Yes, but not together. You’re so explicit!”

 

“What? We are not explicit, you’re just young!” I was joking about, of course, we both were but I hoped dearly at the same time, that Elio and I hadn’t been (loudly, let’s face it) fucking once, when she’d come over during all the holidays I’d taken here. That would be mortifying. 

 

“Well, from all the films I’ve seen, no matter how trashy, none of the kissing has featured as much...touching. And Elio makes far too much noise for it be normal. It’s gross.” 

 

I was so embarrassed that we had been so public in our need. I’d always thought we were careful about when and where we made out. This had been the exact opposite of what I had been aiming for.

 

“When did you even see us kissing, anyway?” I’d need to make a note of where was not as obscure as we’d thought it. 

 

“I came over once, last Spring. Annella said that you were in the orchard. Trees, Oli, aren’t walls and people as big as yourself cannot hide behind them!”

 

There was a smile on Vimini’s face and my shoulders relaxed a little; Elio and I had had sex once in the orchard, but it had been at night, when Vimini wouldn’t have been over. 

 

-

 

In the end, I spent the whole day with Vimini, and her mother found me asleep in my chair, head resting against her mattress; her little hand in mine.

 

“Elio is here, he wants to ask if you’re coming home for dinner.” Vimini’s mother shook me awake; looking a little fond but also sad. That’s all she could be described as nowadays—fond but sad. 

 

“You’re more than welcome to stay, if you’d like. I know V. would be glad of the company.” She added, and I nodded; yes.

 

“I’ll go let Elio know,” I said, standing and placing Vimini’s hand on the bed at her side. 

 

-

 

“I can’t believe you’ve never read _The Beautiful Summer_ , Elio,” 

 

“You sound like my mother. Don’t sound like my mother.”

 

“She’s got a point, if she’s been badgering you about it. It’s good; you’d like it.” 

 

Elio looked at me from where he stood by his wardrobe, pausing in his search for something of mine to put on. He’d already slung my boxers over his little hips; folding that waistband over a few times to keep them up, and now he had an eyebrow cocked—I was so ready to take him back to bed looking like that, but also, I just wanted to stare; I liked to witness him: his life lapping gently, persistently, against the edges of mine—until he would bleed into me like paper marbling. 

 

“Why don’t you read it to me?” he asked, taking my forest green shirt from its hanger and slipping it on. 

 

“Ok. I will.” 

 

I got up, let him soak in my naked body if he wished, and got dressed (“like a normal person!” He pushed my shoulder as I laughed.) in my own clothes but I preferred them on him. 

 

At breakfast, he felt self-conscious at his attire—Samuel had smiled and said; “Maybe Mafalda should stop washing your clothes, Elly.” 

 

“Papà—“

 

“I’m only teasing,”

 

I grabbed Elio around the waist before he could sit down and he squawked, batting at my hands, which was futile as I still got to whisper, smiling into his hair;

 

“I like you in my clothes.”  

 

Elio huffed, but he was smiling and he took a seat away from me; this was to preserve himself, I understood, because he liked it when I got pseudo-possessive. 

 

(Later, when we were lying in some filed, not too far from the Berm, and I was threading flowers through Elio’s hair, he told me that he wore my clothes because it was like I was touching him, even when we were rooms, miles, a few feet apart.) 

 

-

 

On my penultimate night, Elio took my hand in his and kissed all my knuckles and traced the veins at my wrist with his tongue. I didn’t ask. Elio, from time to time, wrapped his scrupulous mind around little things; sometimes, these little things had something to do with me. 

 

When it hit 11:47, he stopped, my skin decidedly damp, and yawned; his eyes heavy and half-lidded, searching my face for something; when I made an exaggerated _mwah!_ gesture, he smiled, as if it were secret, and then got up to get ready for bed. 

 

The nights here were more purple than they were blue, and he was something entirely different;  drifting in-between stages and scenes, like a feeling rather than an experience. Ah, no. He was both; he was everything and I was nothing—nothing in all this vast, forgetting space full of dying stars and strange planets, without him unpicking my seams and exchanging the old thread, weak and feathered, with his new invigorated kind. 

 

_Stupid, over-complicated analogies_ , I thought. 

 

It was rather more simple than that: I loved him.

 

-

 

When I was on the plane, looking out at the shimmer of the ocean so far beneath, I found a little slip of paper in my pocket, it read:

 

_Come back. Those flowers in my hair and I will be waiting. And even if you didn’t come back, we’d be waiting, still._

_(In all honesty, though, I know that you will.)_

God, one day, I promised him over the phone that night, I would never leave. 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments or kudos are obviously welcome if you want to leave them. 
> 
> thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! leave kudos or a comment, if you’d like to—constructive critism is always welcome!
> 
> ‘mia piccola farfalla’—italian for my little butterfly
> 
> ‘anche io sono stanco, posso andare?’—italian for im also very tired, may i be excused?
> 
> ‘ovviamente, tesoro’—italian for of course, treasure
> 
> (i don’t speak italian so if ^^ this is wrong, please let me know and i shall correct it!)


End file.
